LÉONARD TSUGUHARU FOUJITA

(1886-1968)

1952

Sahara, les enfants du desert

Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Sylvie Buisson. This work will be included in the forthcoming fourth volume of the Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita catalogue raisonné, currently being prepared.

Provenance
Maison Jansen, Paris.
Private collection, Madrid (acquired from the above circa 1960).
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2021.

Exhibited
Paris, Galerie Paul Pétridès, Deuxième exposition de Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, June 1952.



The captivating, jewel-like painting, Sahara, les enfants du desert was executed by Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita in 1952, at the beginning of a transformative decade in his personal and artistic trajectory.

Foujita was born in Tokyo in 1886 and trained at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1905. He first arrived in Paris in 1913 and became closely acquainted with many of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century, including Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and Chaïm Soutine; alongside them he rapidly became a leading member of the École de Paris. The term was coined by the art critic André Warnod in 1925, referring to the group of avant-garde artists who led the visual arts scene in Paris from 1905 through the 1920s.

Although the artists comprising the École de Paris each cultivated their own unique styles, they loosely came together in their pursuit of advancing artistic modernity and the general concept of the avant-garde. Foujita enjoyed early and ample success and recognition in Paris during the interwar years, what would be his first period in the city of lights. He exhibited his works at Galerie Chéron and Galerie Paul Pétridès in the 1920s and 1930s, frequented the brasseries and studios of Montmartre and Montparnasse, and was introduced to the Tout-Paris – the fashionable and affluent elite of the city – at various popular bars and cabarets.

In 1930, Foujita concluded his first incandescent episode in Paris, and embarked on a succession of global travels, including time in his native Japan, where he accepted a controversial commission from the emperor to act as the official artist of the war effort. Foujita yearned for the avant-garde crucible of Paris; after nearly two decades, he returned in February 1950 accompanied by his new wife, Kimiyo, and began the second phase of his work in the French capital. Foujita relished reconnecting with his colleagues from the Parisian art scene and garnered numerous portrait commissions and dedicated gallery exhibitions.

Two months after his return to Paris, Foujita's friend, the gallerist Paul Pétridès, organized an extensive exhibition highlighting fifty paintings, and by the end of the year, André Romanet invited him to participate in a series of exhibitions in Algeria. This connection with Romanet proved to be the originating element of Foujita's travels in Africa. Foujita swiftly regained the stature he held the during les années folles, enhanced this time by new exhibition opportunities in North Africa and Spain.

Paul Pétridès eagerly promoted Foujita's new Parisian Renaissance, hosting the aforementioned solo show in 1950, consistently followed by an exhibition every two years until 1964 (Foujita would pass away a mere four years later). In June 1952, Galerie Paul Pétridès presented a dazzling array of forty oils and ten watercolors by Foujita. The artist's process in preparing for an exhibition opening and his dynamic with the gallery are vividly described:

"The painter regularly brings his production there. His paintings are carefully wrapped and the prices established in advance by himself; there is nothing to discuss, and when he shows his latest painting, he immediately asks: 'Do you like it, do you like it?' practically never giving explanations about his works, letting them speak for him. But when it is pointed out to him that his characters squint slightly or that they have one eye smaller than the other, he replies that he is looking for a certain naturalness. When one is surprised by the drawing of certain hands, he responds that 'the painting cannot be perfect.' It is certain that, for Foujita, the picture must not be perfect, nor symmetrical; it would lose all magic and therefore all meaning; there can be no soul without some human imperfection." (S. Buisson quoted in La vie et l'oeuvre de Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita, Paris, 1987, pp. 242-244.)

Sahara, les enfants du desert is one of the paintings that was featured in the 1952 Galerie Paul Pétridès solo show of works by Foujita. His style and subject matter took a distinctive turn during the 1950s. Foujita returned to his meticulously detailed technique and shifted his focus from the sensual nudes of the 1920s and 1930s to quotidian life and a world of children and young girls. Although Foujita had no children of his own, the artist enjoyed playing with young children, and was interested in depicting their qualities of purity and playfulness.

On the occasion of his 1950 exhibition at Galerie Paul Pétridès, Foujita declared, "In reaction to such violent times, I prefer imagining very soft and childish subject matters." By the artist's own admission, the lasting trauma of World War II had a decisive influence over his change in subject matter and style. He portrayed children, adolescents, and young women in a range of contexts, delineated by his very fine and elegant draftsmanship. Foujita's inimitable doll-like portraiture developed during the early 1950s was in part a reaction to the war that had just transpired. He was also fond of collecting wax and porcelain dolls and made small toy puppets by hand, perhaps as a comfort to insulate himself from the echo of the war's horrors.

Foujita's Sahara, les enfants du desert merges the artist's personal life experiences of recent travels in North Africa with fantasy and his "soft" vision of a realm of charming children and amiable beasts. Four children in the foreground are bedecked in white, black, and red indigenous garb, joined by a jolly chimpanzee in the center of their grouping. The background is composed of an oasis of palm trees and water and the suggestion of a clay-colored North African fort or townscape, complete with a minaret projecting above the blocky shapes. There is a deft balance in the scene between spontaneous narrative action and the stillness of detailed portraiture.

Foujita invented and depicted a magical vignette of innocent adventure in an exotic setting. Sahara, les enfants du desert, like Foujita's figural paintings inspired by Medieval and Renaissance masterworks, defies temporal constraints, and is rendered as a fairytale scene rather than a specific document of his observations of Algiers and its surrounding environs.

He employed the customary white ground that he had developed years earlier which lends not only a restrained, pearlescent luminosity to the work, but also augments the nonspecific, the theatrical, and the fantastical by dislocating the primary subject matter in space and time. Foujita's blending of cultures is signified in the color of the canvas itself, which recalls both Japanese prints which had a significant impact on European artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also of dainty porcelain produced in France. Foujita has modeled the four children's faces with the utmost delicacy, in keeping with his refined technique.

Sahara, les enfants du desert by Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita was painted at a pivotal time in the artist's life, when he was exploring new continents, renewing earlier painting themes and techniques, and asserting his singular, celebrated vision.